Silver Falls

History:

Silver Falls City, platted here in 1888, was an early center for logging and some fairly unsuccessful homestead farming. Future US President Herbert Hoover surveyed some of the land here while serving as a young engineer.

By 1900, June Drake, a Silverton photographer, began pushing for park status. His early photographs of the falls have become classics. An inspector for the National Park Service rejected the area for national park status in 1926, however, because logging had scarred the area with "thousands of stumps that from a distance look like so many dark headstones."

After that, the private owner of South Falls charged admission to let people watch as he floated derelict cars over the falls. In 1928 a paying audience watched daredevil Al Faussett canoe over 177-fout South Falls. He had to spend months afterward in a hospital, recovering from his injuries.

In 1935 President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced that Silver Falls would be one of his largest Recreational Demonstration Projects. He bought private land and employed young men in the Civilian Conservation Corps to develop park facilities. Since then the forest has regrown so that most visitors do not even notice that the area was once logged.